Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and other tech companies are trying new ways to label content made by AI.
On May 22, a fake photo of an explosion at the Pentagon caused chaos online.
Within a matter of minutes of being posted, the realistic-looking image spread on Twitter and other social media networks after being retweeted by some popular accounts. Reporters asked government officials all the way up to the White House press office what was going on.
The photo was quickly determined to be a hoax, likely generated by AI. But in the short amount of time it circulated, the fake image had a real impact and even briefly moved financial markets.
This isn’t an entirely new problem. Online misinformation has existed since the dawn of the internet, and crudely photoshopped images fooled people long before generative AI became mainstream. But recently, tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and even new AI feature updates to Photoshop have supercharged the issue by making it easier and cheaper to create hyperrealistic fake images, video, and text, at scale. Experts say we can expect to see more fake images like the Pentagon one, especially when they can cause political disruption.
One report by Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, predicted that as much as 90 percent of content on the internet could be created or edited by AI by 2026. Already, spammy news sites seemingly generated entirely by AI are popping up. The anti-misinformation platform NewsGuard started tracking such sites and found nearly three times as many as they did a few weeks prior.
“We already saw what happened in 2016 when we had the first election with a flooding of disinformation,” said Joshua Tucker, a professor and co-director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. “Now we’re going to see the other end of this equation.”
So what, if anything, should the tech companies that are rapidly developing AI be doing to prevent their tools from being used to bombard the internet with hyperrealistic misinformation?
One novel approach — that some experts say could actually work — is to use metadata, watermarks, and other technical systems to distinguish fake from real. Companies like Google, Adobe, and Microsoft are all supporting some form of labeling of AI in their products. Google, for example, said at its recent I/O conference that, in the coming months, it will attach a written disclosure, similar to a copyright notice, underneath AI-generated results on Google Images. OpenAI’s popular image generation technology DALL-E already adds a colorful stripe watermark to the bottom of all images it creates.
“We all have a fundamental right to establish a common objective reality,” said Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe’s content authenticity initiative group. “And that starts with knowing what something is and, in cases where it makes sense, who made it or where it came from.”
In order to reduce confusion between fake and real images, the content authenticity initiative group developed a tool Adobe is now using called content credentials that tracks when images are edited by AI. The company describes it as a nutrition label: information for digital content that stays with the file wherever it’s published or stored. For example, Photoshop’s latest feature, Generative Fill, uses AI to quickly create new content in an existing image, and content credentials can keep track of those changes.
AI-labeling tools like Adobe’s are still in their early stages, and by no means should they be considered a silver bullet to the problem of misinformation. It’s technically possible to manipulate a watermark or metadata. Plus, not every AI generation system will want to disclose that it’s made that way. And as we’ve learned with the rise of online conspiracy theories in recent years, people will often ignore facts in favor of believing falsehoods that confirm their personal beliefs. But if implemented well — and especially if these labels are seen as more neutral than traditional social media fact-checking — AI disclosures could be one of our only hopes for navigating the increasingly blurry distinction between fake and real media online.
Here is how some of these early AI markup systems could work, what the limitations are, and what users can do to navigate our confusing post-truth internet reality in the meantime.
The devil is in the metadata
When you look at an image on social media or a search engine today, odds are you don’t know where the photo came from — let alone if it was created by AI. But underneath the hood, there’s often a form of metadata, or information associated with the digital image file, that tells you basic details, like when and where the photo was taken. Some tech companies are now starting to add specific metadata about AI to their products at the moment of creation, and they’re making that information more public in an effort to help users determine the authenticity of what they’re looking at.
Google recently said it will start marking up images made by its own new AI systems in the original image files. And when you see an image in Google Search that’s made by Google’s AI systems, it will say something like “AI-generated with Google” underneath the image. Going a step further, the company announced it’s partnering with publishers like Midjourney and stock photography site Shutterstock to let them self-tag their images as AI-generated in Google Search. This way, if you come across a Midjourney image in Google Search, it will say something like “Image self-labeled as AI-generated”
Google Search public liaison Danny Sullivan said that this kind of AI labeling is part of a broader effort to give people more context about images they’re seeing.
”If we can show you a helpful label, we’re going to want to do that,” said Sullivan, “but we’re also going to want to try to give you background information that we can determine independent of the label.”
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Google
That’s why Google is also adding an “About this image” feature next to image search results — whether they are AI labeled or not — that you can click and see when the image was first indexed by Google, where it may have first appeared, and where else it’s been seen online. The idea is, if you searched for, say, “Pentagon explosion” and saw a bunch of images in the results, you would be able to see a fact-checked news article debunking the piece.
“These tools are really designed to help people understand information literacy more and bake it into the search product itself,” said Sullivan.
Other major industry players have also been working on the issue of how to label AI-generated content. In 2021, a group of major companies including Microsoft, Adobe, the BBC, and Intel created a coalition called the C2PA. The group is tasked with helping to create an interoperable open standard for companies to share the provenance, or history of ownership, of a piece of media. C2PA created its first open standard last January, and since then, Adobe and Microsoft have released features using that standard.
For example, if you’re a photographer at a news outlet, you can mark when a specific picture was taken, who took it, and have that be digitally signed by your publisher. Later, your editor could make changes to the photo, signing it again with a seal of authenticity that it’s been verified by the C2PA standard. This way, you know that the photo was taken by a person — not generated by AI— and know who has made edits to it and when. The system uses cryptography to preserve the privacy of sensitive information.
“Now you can read the entire lineage of the history of a piece of digital content,” said Mounir Ibrahim, EVP of public affairs and impact at Truepic, a visual authenticity app that is a member of C2PA. “The purpose of us is to help content consumers … decipher the difference between synthetic and authentic.”
Knowing the history and provenance of an image could potentially help users verify the legitimacy of anything from a headshot on a dating app to a breaking news photo. But for this to work, companies need to adopt the standard.
Right now, it’s up to companies to adopt the C2PA standard and label verified content as they wish. The organization is also discussing potentially standardizing the look of the C2PA content credential when it shows up on images, Ibrahim said. In the future, the C2PA credential could be similar to the little padlock icon next to the URL in your browser window that signifies your connection is secure. When you see the proposed C2PA icon, you would know that the image you’re seeing has had its origins verified.
So far, two big C2PA members, Adobe and Microsoft, have announced tools that integrate C2PA standards into their products to mark up AI-generated content. Microsoft is labeling all AI-generated content in Bing Image Generator and Microsoft Designer, and Adobe is using C2PA standards in its new AI Firefly product’s content credentials.
“The biggest challenge is we need more platforms to adopt this,” said Ibrahim.
While the C2PA-style metadata labels work behind the scenes, another approach is for AI systems to add visible watermarks, as OpenAI has done with the rainbow bar at the bottom of DALL-E images. The company says it’s also working on a version of watermarking for its text app, ChatGPT. The challenge with watermarks, though, is that they can be removed. A quick Google search turns up forms of people discussing how to circumvent the imprint.
Another imperfect option is technology that can detect AI-generated content after the fact. In January, OpenAI released a tool that lets you cross-check a block of text to determine whether it’s likely written by AI. The problem, though, is that by OpenAI’s own assessment, the tool is not fully reliable. It correctly identified only 26 percent of AI-written texts in OpenAI’s evaluations, although it’s notably more accurate with longer than shorter text.
“We don’t want any of our models to be used for misleading purposes anywhere,” said a spokesperson for OpenAI in a statement. “Our usage policies also require automated systems, including conversational AI and chatbots, to disclose to users that they are interacting with our models.”
At the end of the day, even if these early AI flagging and identification systems are flawed, they’re a first step.
What comes next
It’s still early days for tech platforms trying to automate the identification of AI-generated content. Until they identify a dependable solution, however, fact-checkers are left manually filling in the gaps, debunking images like the Pope in a puffy jacket or fake audio of politicians.
Sam Gregory, executive director of human rights and civic journalism network Witness, who works with fact-checkers largely outside of the US, said that while he thinks technical solutions to AI identification like watermarking are promising, many fact-checkers are worried about the onslaught of misinformation that could come their way with AI in the meantime. Already, many professional fact-checkers are dealing with far more content to check than humanly possible.
“Is an individual going to be blamed because they couldn’t identify an AI-generated image? Or is a fact-checker going to be the one to take the strain because they’re overwhelmed by this volume?” said Gregory. The responsibility to address AI misinformation “needs to lie on the people who are designing these tools, building these models, and distributing them,” he added.
In many cases, Gregory says, it’s unclear exactly what social media platforms’ rules are about allowing AI-generated content.
TikTok has one of the more updated policies around “synthetic media,” or media that is created or manipulated by AI. The policy, which was revised in March 2023, allows synthetic media but requires that, if it shows realistic scenes, the image must be clearly disclosed with a caption, sticker, or otherwise. The company also doesn’t allow synthetic media that contains the likeness of any private figure or anyone under 18. TikTok says it worked with outside partners like the industry nonprofit Partnership on AI for feedback on adhering to a framework for responsible AI practices.
“While we are excited by the creative opportunities that AI opens up for creators, we are also firmly committed to developing guardrails, such as policies, for its safe and transparent use,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “Like most of our industry, we continue to work with experts, monitor the progression of this technology, and evolve our approach.”
But many other platforms have policies that might need some updating. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube both have general rules against manipulated media that misleads users, but those could be clarified regarding what uses are acceptable or not, according to Gregory. Meta’s fact-checking policies state that manipulated media containing misinformation is eligible for fact-checking by its third-party partners, as it did with the fake Pentagon AI explosion claims.
“AI is bigger than any single person, company, or country, and requires cooperation between all relevant stakeholders,” Meta said in a statement. “We are actively monitoring new trends and working to be purposeful and evidence-based in our approach to AI-generated content.”
Technological solutions to help people fact-check content themselves, like AI detection systems and watermarks, couldn’t come sooner.
But NYU’s Tucker says we need to test these solutions to see whether they’re effective in changing people’s minds when they encounter misleading AI content, and what the disclosures need to look to be impactful. For example, if the disclosures that an image or video is AI-generated are too subtle, people could miss it entirely. And sometimes, labels don’t work as expected. For example, Tucker co-authored a study last year showing that high- or low-quality news credibility labels had limited effects on people’s news consumption habits and failed to change people’s perceptions.
Still, there’s hope that if AI disclosures are seen not as politicized fact-checks but as neutral context about the origins of an image, they could be more effective. To know whether these labels are resonating with people and changing their minds will require more research.
There is an urgency to figure out these problems as AI-generated content floods the internet. In the past, tech companies had time to debate the hypothetical risks of AI misinformation because mainstream generative AI products weren’t yet out in the wild. But those threats are now very real.
These new tools that label AI-generated content, while far from perfect, could help mitigate some of that risk. Let’s hope tech companies move forward with the necessary speed to fix problems that come with AI as quickly as they’re being created.
The Supreme Court sided with pigs. Will California?
Last month, in a welcome surprise to animal welfare advocates, the US Supreme Court sided with pigs over the pork industry.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld Proposition 12, a California law that partially bans the sale of pork from farms that keep pregnant breeding pigs, known as sows, in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. They’re akin to forcing a human to live their entire life in a bathtub. (Other parts of the law, which require eggs and veal to come from cage-free animals, took effect last year and were not a part of the Supreme Court case.)
While it was a victory for those who argue against caging intelligent, social animals like pigs for months on end, animal welfare wasn’t the main point for the justices. Rather, the case hinged on the ability of US states to set their own standards for how goods imported from other states are produced. California imports nearly all of its pork from other states, and the National Pork Producers Council, an industry trade group that brought the lawsuit, argued that the state’s heightened standards were imposing an unfair burden on other states, particularly top pork producers like Iowa and Minnesota. The industry estimated it would have to spend $294 million to $348 million to convert enough barns to crate-free.
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Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media
Given the conservative, business-friendly majority on the Court, and the fact that 26 mostly red states and the Biden administration sided with the pork producers, the mother pigs’ odds didn’t look good. Animal welfare advocates I spoke to before the ruling assumed it likely wouldn’t go their way, which could have posed an existential threat to animal welfare laws in other states. (Disclosure: The effort to pass Proposition 12 was led by the Humane Society of the United States, where I worked from 2012 to 2017. I worked briefly on Prop 12 in 2018 while at a different animal welfare organization.)
To the surprise of both sides, that didn’t happen. But now that Prop 12 has been upheld, there’s another question: How will America’s strongest farm animal welfare law actually be enforced?
A law is only good as its enforcement
The animal welfare movement has poured millions of dollars into banning cages and crates for farmed animals, a strategy that has proven surprisingly successful. Hundreds of food corporations have pledged to source exclusively cage-free eggs and/or pork, and over a dozen states have passed what are called “production” bans, which prohibit in-state meat or egg producers from using cages and crates for one or more farmed animal species. Most of these states aren’t themselves agricultural heavyweights — they import most of their animal products from other states. So as a way of affecting production elsewhere, eight states have passed “sales” bans, like California’s Prop 12, which go much further by banning the sale of eggs, pork, and/or veal from caged animals raised anywhere in the world.
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All told, California’s Prop 12 should get around 40 million egg-laying hens, tens of thousands of veal calves, and half a million sows out of cages and crates each year. Pigs will go from having around 14 square feet of space to 24 square feet, while hens will go from around 75 square inches to double the space or more. Such laws don’t create humane conditions, as the animals are still in factory farms, but it’s progress nonetheless.
However, Prop 12 does have important carveouts for industry.
For example, mother pigs can still be confined in crates for five days prior to the expected date of birth, and for several weeks after while they nurse piglets. Importantly, pork that goes into processed or precooked foods, like hot dogs, soups, and frozen pizzas — which accounts for 42 percent of California’s pork consumption — is also exempt. (The law only covers whole, uncooked pork cuts like bacon or ribs.)
But for the law to cover the tens of millions of animals it’s supposed to protect each year, it’ll need to be strongly enforced, which is far from a given with animal protection regulations.
“These laws are only as good as the enforcement,” said Bryan Pease, a longtime animal lawyer in California. “Unfortunately, the animal rights movement has a bit of a track record of passing great laws, claiming victory, and then just moving on to the next thing without actually ensuring enforcement.” Pease pointed to California animal welfare laws that had been violated and/or weakly enforced, like laws to prohibit the sale of foie gras, fur, and dogs from puppy mills (as well as cats and rabbits). Pease has sued two San Diego restaurants for allegedly selling foie gras and a store in Orange County for allegedly selling fur, and accused a store in Escondido of selling dogs from puppy mills.
As of 2019, there was only evidence of enforcement for one of 16 state cage production bans, according to the Washington, DC-based nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI). That one instance happened to be in Southern California, where an egg farm was charged in 2017 for not providing hens adequate space.
But there’s more evidence that cage-free sales bans have been enforced. Between 2015 and 2019, according to records obtained by AWI, California audited 15 noncompliant egg farms, five of which were out of state. Oregon investigated complaints of a noncompliant egg producer and a noncompliant egg wholesaler, both from out of state. Earlier this year, when Arizona’s cage-free egg law took effect, the state issued hold orders on eggs from out-of-state producers 32 times from entering the food supply until they could verify production methods.
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AP/Rich Pedroncelli
Scant evidence of enforcement doesn’t mean there’s mass fraud. It just means enforcing animal welfare laws doesn’t appear to be a priority for states — and the production ban laws don’t even contain provisions that give states authority to enforce them, said Dena Jones of AWI.
Absent strict enforcement, compliance shouldn’t be assumed: Meat producers have been repeatedly accused of price fixing, water pollution, labor violations, and cruelty to animals.
Jon Lovvorn, chief counsel for animal protection litigation at the Humane Society of the United States, said that “the interlocking nature of the contractual relationships in this industry” — contracts between meat and egg producers and restaurant food distributors and grocers — “make compliance [with Prop 12] more likely.”
Prop 12 stipulates that grocers and restaurants aren’t liable for selling noncompliant products so long as they had received written certification of compliance from producers. As a result, meat and egg producers are incentivized to follow the law lest they risk not just the chance of monetary penalties and jail time, but also getting sued by the retailers for selling them noncompliant goods.
Lovvorn said that while he expects enforcement to be straightforward, it “doesn’t mean there won’t be problems, and it doesn’t mean there won’t be people cheating the system. … I think that’s going to exist in any enforcement system, but I don’t think this is going to be a huge problem.”
The industries that have allegedly flouted some of California’s animal welfare laws, like those that prohibit the sale of foie gras, fur, and dogs, are fragmented and informal. The egg and pork industries, by contrast, are highly consolidated, which could lead to higher rates of compliance compared to other animal industries, Pease believes.
“As long as you gain compliance from [the major producers], then you’re pretty much looking at full compliance, and that’s good,” he said. Many of the nation’s largest pork producers had publicly stated that they’ll comply with Prop 12 before the Supreme Court’s decision, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, Seaboard Foods, Hormel, and Clemens Food Group.
There’s ample evidence the egg and pork industries are complying with cage-free laws and keeping more of their animals in cage-free barns. In 2015, when the nation’s first cage-free sales law went into effect, just 6 percent of US hens were cage-free; today it’s close to 40 percent. That number will shoot up in 2024 and 2025 as more state laws come into effect and food corporations fulfill their cage-free commitments. A few years ago, the pork industry said over a quarter of its sows were crate-free for around 70 percent of their four-month pregnancies, up from 10 percent in 2011.
How Prop 12 will be enforced
Despite the minimal evidence of California enforcing its cage-free laws, Jones of AWI said the state is gearing up to ensure compliance with Prop 12: “California appears to have done the most in terms of setting up enforcement programs, so we’ll have to watch down the road.”
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) will require pork, veal, and egg producers to work with one of its five accredited third-party certifiers, or with the state itself, to conduct annual audits on their farms. But the enforcement rollout has been, and will continue to be for the months ahead, a bit messy.
First, let’s look at the sale of eggs and veal. These components of the law went into effect at the start of 2022, but the CDFA didn’t finalize regulations until September 2022. Since the egg and veal components took effect, producers have been allowed to “self-certify” — essentially attesting to grocers and food distributors that they are in compliance, with the understanding that they are subject to inspection. Egg, veal, and pork producers will all be allowed to self-certify until January 1, 2024, when they’ll need to be certified by a third-party auditor or the CDFA.
The pork component of Prop 12, which was delayed due to the Supreme Court case, is now slated to fully take effect on July 1, 2023. The six-month gap that allows producers to self-certify could mean some of the pork sold in California is noncompliant.
“During the transition period, it may be difficult to determine if whole pork is from breeding sows raised in compliance with Prop 12,” said CDFA spokesperson Jay Van Rein.
Despite the uncertainty, pork producers are pushing to convert their facilities and begin the auditing process. “Since the Supreme Court made their ruling, it’s gotten very busy here,” said Matt Jones, vice president of operations at the accredited certifier Validus, speaking about the flurry of interest from producers looking to understand certification.
Grocery stores and other food distributors must also certify that eggs, veal, and pork they sell is compliant, which entails demonstrating through an audit trail that the product came from a certified producer.
The political and corporate fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision
While the political fight over cages has failed in the courts, members of Congress from states that lead in pork production are looking to overturn Prop 12 on Capitol Hill. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) is expected to soon reintroduce a bill that would prevent state and local governments from setting standards for how agricultural products imported from other states are produced, which she said would “circumvent what Prop 12 does.” The bill is a repeat of past efforts by former Iowa Rep. Steve King to do the same.
On the other end of the political spectrum, progressive Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) last year introduced the PIGS Act to ban gestation crates nationwide.
However, animal advocates are more likely to find success at the state level, where the vast majority of legal progress for farmed animals has been made. There are legislative efforts underway to ban gestation crates in Oklahoma, home to around 8 percent of US sows, and allocate funds to help pork producers transition to crate-free systems.
The Prop 12 decision could also spur food corporations to eliminate gestation crates from their supply chains, as it’ll expand the crate-free pork supply. In the early 2010s, nearly 60 fast food chains and grocers, including McDonald’s and Kroger, pledged to source crate-free pork, but most still haven’t fulfilled their commitments.
For decades, there’s been a race to the bottom on animal welfare on America’s farms, where over 200 million animals are stuffed into cages and crates. It’s torture, but it’s perfectly legal torture in most states, and at least for now, it’s still the dominant method of production for pork and eggs.
It should be expected that even incremental laws like Prop 12 will be challenged in the courts by industry, as they’re fundamental to our system of cheap meat. When a law survives, as Proposition 12 has, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if some producers violate it, or if enforcement is spotty. These aren’t reasons to ditch politics as a means of social change for the billions of animals factory-farmed in the US annually, but they should put renewed focus on not just passing laws and improving corporate food policies, but also ensuring they work as intended.
What happens if everybody walks off the job?
The Hollywood writers strike marked its one-month anniversary on Friday, with no signs of slowing down. While other guilds in the industry are still on the job — except when they’re blocked by picket lines — the writers may soon get company on those picket lines.
Two other major entertainment guilds, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), also entered the summer with looming contract expiration dates. Both groups’ agreements with AMPTP, the trade association that represents the industry’s film and TV production companies, end on June 30. A lot could happen between now and then, but the situation is looking dicey.
All of that means that come July 1, the studios may be facing a double or even triple strike, in effect shutting Hollywood down completely.
The DGA rarely strikes — the last time was in 1987 — and its leadership has not called for a strike authorization vote. But its relations with the AMPTP have been trickier than usual. Negotiations began on May 10, with demands that in part mirror the WGA’s concerns. The main sticking point is wage and residual increases that keep in step with rising costs of living. In particular, lower residuals for shows on streaming services, where the lion’s share of entertainment now lives, have wreaked havoc for many people in the industry, drastically reducing compensation and making it increasingly difficult to just pay the bills.
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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In the past, the DGA has sometimes managed to make an agreement with AMPTP ahead of the start of bargaining, effectively setting a pattern for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA to follow in their own demands. Last November, the DGA sent a “pre-negotiation” offer to the AMPTP, seeking resolution ahead of bargaining. The AMPTP reportedly rejected the DGA’s proposal, meaning both parties came to the bargaining table without an arrangement.
The situation seemed to intensify due to an unforced error. On May 23, Warner Bros. Discovery launched Max, its newly rebranded streaming platform, which had previously been named HBO Max. Eagle-eyed observers noticed that in listed credits, the platform lumped writers, directors, producers, and so on into one category labeled “creators.” Aside from the queasy implications that the greatest works of cinema and television were just “content,” the choice on the company’s part ran afoul of hard-fought contract regulations regarding credits for artists.
It was a weird choice, and one that set blood boiling in Hollywood. The presidents of the WGA and the DGA issued a rare joint statement, with DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter noting that “The devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.”
By the end of the day, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it would modify how credits were listed on the platform in compliance with its preexisting contract agreement with the unions. Yet the strong language indicated that the DGA was ready to play hardball.
Meanwhile, members of SAG-AFTRA have been vocally supportive of the WGA. This is no shock, since on top of the same issue of residuals and wages, the union — which includes, in addition to film and TV actors, people who work in radio, singers, voice actors, influencers, models, and other media professionals — is concerned about the existential threat posed by AI and other technologies. Even before the WGA’s strike began, SAG-AFTRA issued statements regarding how the use of AI could eliminate or greatly reduce work for its members.
Members of SAG-AFTRA have shown up on picket lines to support the writers, and the star power posed by some of its most prominent members helps bring attention to the WGA’s strike. It’s also an effort to remind the studios that when their own negotiations begin, they’re ready for a fight. Underlining that implicit statement, the leadership of SAG-AFTRA unanimously agreed to ask its membership for a strike authorization vote, which concludes this coming Monday, June 5. That’s a move designed to signal solidarity to the AMPTP ahead of negotiations.
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Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
It’s clear that all of Hollywood’s unions — not just the three with expiring contracts — are working together to show solidarity. Both IATSE, which represents Hollywood’s “below-the-line” workers (everyone from grips to craft services to first aid to electricians), and the Teamsters (who drive trucks, wrangle animals, manage locations, and a lot more) are authorized by their leadership to refuse to cross picket lines, and have made that choice throughout the writers strike. DGA and SAG members have frequently refused as well.
The DGA’s negotiations are set to end on June 7, the same day SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations begin. Knowing this, on May 31, the leaders of the Teamsters, IATSE, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA issued a joint statement supporting the DGA in their negotiations, declaring that “as eyes around the world again turn towards the negotiation table, we send a clear message to the AMPTP: Our solidarity is not to be underestimated.”
When writers go on strike, some of the industry can still operate, provided their workers are willing to cross picket lines. (Due to available personnel, the WGA also can’t picket every production, and thus chooses strategically.) But if the DGA or SAG-AFTRA walks off the job — or both — then productions will shut down across the board. Hollywood would grind to a halt.
Here’s what’s most significant about all of this: All three unions have never gone on strike at the same time, in the history of Hollywood. The fact that this scenario is possible, even likely, emphasizes how extraordinary this moment is in the entertainment business. Technology has always been a major driver in labor negotiations. But the major companies’ use of streaming services, and their demonstrated interest in cutting out humans through the use of tech, poses an existential threat to everyone who makes the TV, movies, and other scripted entertainment that brings in billions of dollars every year. The question, at this juncture, is whether there’s a future for Hollywood at all — or whether entertainment will be swallowed whole by the tech industry. For Hollywood’s artists and craftspeople, that’s a fate worth fighting against.